


What she learned in whispers

by halfeatenmoon



Category: The Traitor Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 08:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13027365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfeatenmoon/pseuds/halfeatenmoon
Summary: Tain Hu never knew a life without the Empire of Masks in Aurdwynn, but she always knew there was more to life than what they taught her in school.





	What she learned in whispers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lifeisyetfair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeisyetfair/gifts).



Tain Hu was born too far from the ocean to see the Falcresti ships on the horizon, coming to make Aurdwynn in their own image. She was born too late to see Falcrest infiltrate her homeland with irrigation and paper money and loans. She grew up under Falcresti rule, but her father made sure she knew that this was not as the world should be.

"They'll tell you there are rules," he would say, in the evenings, with a four-year-old Tain Hu on his knee in front of the fire. During the day he became someone else, and their keep became somewhere else, too; a box full of foreign bureaucrats, and her father cold and aloof. In the evenings, though, he was her papa again, listening to everything she saw and heard that day, and telling her what he'd learned, too.

"They'll tell you that there are rules, that these rules are proven and unchangeable, that they come from fact and science, the same the whole world over."

"Rules are for following. They make us safe."

He shook his head. "Some things are true and unchangeable. The sun rises every morning, and it gets cold at night. There are rules we follow because there are consequences - like we have to catch and smoke as much fish as we can in summer or we'll have nothing to eat in winter. But their rules are made by men, not by the world. And not by Aurdwynn."

Tain Hu's attention wandered when her father talked like this. She was too young to be interested in the laws of men and nature, yet. But one day soon she would enter the tutelage of the Masquerade, and there were things she had to know even when she was too young to care. When her tutor, Hyford, taught her that there was a Vultjag from before, riddled with disease and famine, and now a healthy and prosperous Aurdwynn under the empire, she heard her papa's voice in her head, saying _their science cannot tell us who or what we love_.

 

 

They told tales in her keep, of the fierce and noble battles of Aurdwynn's past. These were her heroes, to her Masquerade tutor's dismay; not the clever merchants or the engineers who ruled by fear and whispers, but the Aurdwynni men and women who fought and ruled and died by the sword. She was seven when she snuck away from her tutor and to her father's side, asking could she learn to fence, please? He swelled with pride and found her the biggest sword she could hold at that age, taught her the right grip and the way to hold her body to support the weight of the weapon.

It was a thrill to pick up the sword, but disappointing how quickly her arms grew too tired to hold it up. For the first time, she felt a seed of doubt about her dreams. Maybe she didn't have the strength.

"it's hard work, being a duellist and a warrior," he told her, smiling. "But that's the only way to get there. All your heroes had arms that ached every day, too."

 

 

Tain Hu was twelve years old in the summer of the Fools' Rebellion, when Aurdwynn rose up with the rage of two decades of colonial rule and all the might of a people who still believed themselves warriors. Tain Hu watched with delight as the rebels rose, and then with remorse and horror when the fist of Falcrest came down to lay waste to all of their plans. She was old enough, now, to swallow the pain she felt in the trials that followed, seeing her father and her brothers taken away and knowing, no matter what they said, that they were marching to their deaths at Treatymont.

She could not swallow her rage that it had come to this, that the Aurdwynn she believed in had failed again. She couldn't believe her heroes could fall to the liars and thieves of the Masquerade.

"I don't understand," she said, to her tutor one day. "Aurdwynn fights with sword and arrow, and Falcrest with words and trade. How could Falcrest's tools ever have conquered a rebellion in blood?"

"An important question!" He clapped his hands together. "The sword cuts, but it's typical of bloodthirsty, primitive Aurdwynn ways to see no way to victory than to cut down its enemies. It is not only how you fight, but your number, and whether you can persuade that number to stay by your side when you must march for three days without food and sleep in the mud with nothing but the flea-bitten bodies of your fellow soldiers to keep you warm at night. The sword cuts, and for your people, perhaps it inspires. But it does not keep people loyal when the nights are long and they begin to think of their comfort back home, the plentiful food, the clean water, all new to them since the Empire of Masks sailed in to Treatymont, and they begin to think, is this what we really want? To go back to the famine and disease of the life we had before?"

He smiled, and Tain Hu wished she had a sword in her hand now, to cut the smugness off his face.

"Oh, and Aurdwynn fights by the sword no more," he said, patronising. "You talk as if there were an us and them. Aurdwynn is a land of peace, now, a land ruled by words and money and hygeine, just as Falcrest is. We are _all_  the Empire of Masks."

Tain Hu seethed, but quietly, knowing this battle of words was one she could not win. She would submit in this battle, but she yearned for revenge and revolution as fiercely as any of the Fools' Rebellion. She would submit in this battle, but the war would be hers, and its last words would be written in blood.

She did make a quiet note, though, of the power and influence that Falcrest's paper money could buy. What Falcrest wanted her to learn from the defeat of the Fools' Rebellion was that there was no use in even trying to fight, for the might of the Empire was infallible; there could be no victory, there could never be any victory.

What Tain Hu really learned, though, was that while the blade was the most honest way to live, fight and die, it may take using some of Falcrest's tools to bring down Falcrest's army.

 

 

The first time Tain Hu took another girl to her bed, she was fifteen and she was so afraid she might die. She remembered everything her family had told her, the things still whispered among the woodsmen and craftsmen and serfs who held to the old ways and knew she was a leader they could trust. She knew that in a free world, and a just world, this would be no more a crime than eating whatever she wanted for breakfast. But the people who taught her to value freedom were not the same people who held her life in her hands. As she led the other girl to her room, their hands hot and sweaty and intertwined, she thought her heart was going to beat its way up her throat and choke her. She knew it wasn't wrong. She knew it was still a crime, and enough of a crime to end her life. Even now, she feared that this girl who caught her eye could be a honeypot sent to trap, her, that this was the last pleasure she might ever know before her death.

When they reached the bedroom and bolted the door, and the other girl hungrily took her mouth in a kiss, Tain Hu thought it was worth it. Her hands were still shaking, and she thought she might fly apart, but she knew now that taking this risk was better than living without it.

As they slept in her narrow bed, clinging together, Tain Hu realised, drowsily, that nobody had come to arrest them yet. She was on guard the next morning, when her girlfriend slipped out of the room, and the rest of the day when she watched every interaction for a sign that someone knew and her doom would soon be upon her. It wasn't for another week that she realised perhaps she had gotten away with it. If she could do it once, she could do it again.

 

 

When her father and brothers were killed after the height of the rebellion, Tain Hu could not take up her role as duchess at once. She would have, if she had been allowed, but the responsibility for her duchy fell to Hyford in the absence of another adult family member who could take the throne. They said she was too young, which was true; they thought they had six years to mold her into the kind of ruler they wanted, which was not. When she took her place as duchess on her eighteenth birthday, she had had two educations. The Masquerade's was not the one that taught her what she needed to know.

Her father and brothers had rebelled for Vultjag, for Aurdwynn, and paid a harsh price. She knew now, from her Incrastic education, that this was the last in a long line of Aurdwynni rebellions. Aurdwynn has one vice, they said, one incurable disease. But it was the first time Vultjag had rebelled not for land or power, but for freedom. Tain Hu was determined that it wouldn't be the last.

Her father's education didn't end at his death. Sometimes she had doubted, but she soon learned how Aurdwynn's truths lived in her people, in the woodsmen and craftsmen and hunters and serfs, too. When they trusted her to listen, they told her that the Masquerade's laws were just one ruler's invention, their history just one version of history. That their old ways were not wrong. That no Incrastic science could tell them who they should love. All of them whispered that despite the Masquerade's claims, Aurdwynn still could not be ruled.

She did not want to live in hiding any longer, for her people to live their true lives in secret and hide from their imperial masters. Yet she had seen one failed rebellion in Aurdwynn already, and she had no desire to see another. She would wait, then, until the time was right, even though every moment she waited cost her more of her people lost to Xate Yawa's cold cellar, more temples torched and mouths gone hungry. She would wait, but she would compromise nothing else. She would take every piece of paper money that made its way across her borders, and use it to make the people of Vultjag so strong that they could take on the Masquerade itself. She would give her people all the kindness they had shown her, so that they would follow her to the bitter end just as she would walk there herself for them.

She was Duchess Vultjag, now, and every measure of power she had would go towards feeding her people, and setting them free.

Tain Hu had spent a long time learning. Now it was time to act.


End file.
